Articles Tagged Craig Leerman

Digital consoles are also referred to as “mixing systems,” and it’s an appropriate moniker because in addition to supplying control surfaces with a lot of onboard functionality as well as I/O, they can be further expanded in a variety of ways with the addition of “outboard” capabilities such as offline editing stations, remote apps, interface cards and modules, and of course, digital snakes, networking, and personal monitoring. Offline editing provides the ability to set up patching, scenes and other parameters…
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If you need a class compliant sound pressure level (SPL) monitoring and logging system or just want a great way to keep track of SPL at gigs—keep reading. SG Audio of Denmark has developed an SPL measurement system called 10EaZy, and the folks at their exclusive U.S. distributor, Rational Acoustics, were “Smaart” enough (see what I did there) to send me a system for review. SG Audio offers measurement systems designed to meet the needs of those who require IEC/ANSI…
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Like the majority of people working in the audio biz, I love music. Growing up in the 1970s, I was fortunate that my favorite FM radio station played a pretty diverse selection of musical styles, including folk, soft rock, pop, disco, R&B, rock, and even heavy metal. While exposed to quite a few musical styles and artists, I developed personal favorites. Most Saturdays would find me at the record store, spending the few bucks earned that week from mowing lawns…
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A few weeks ago one of the neighbors in the industrial complex where I keep my shop came over to say hello while I was in the middle of doing some PM (preventative maintenance) on cables. As I sat at a bench surrounded by piles of microphone and loudspeaker lines, he asked why I was spending so much time on “stupid cords.” I replied, simply, that without the stupid cords, the rest of my equipment is worthless. A system is…
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Many of us are masters at the logistical side of loading and unloading trucks and moving gear. Correctly positioning and tuning the PA for the best coverage is almost second nature. After years of doing our jobs, we’ve become decent (or better) mixers, getting musicians to sound great in the PA. We’ve even acquired the skill of dealing with diva performers and smarmy promoters. And when problems arise on a show like they always seem to do, our troubleshooting and…
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It’s always a good idea to have a spare mixer on hand at every show. Years ago I learned this valuable lesson first hand while freelancing as an A1 for an A/V company. Let’s take a trip in the wayback machine… We were setting up the sound system for a large general session at a corporate show when I discovered that the house console would not power up. It turned out that the rack housing the power supplies for the…
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While my first microphone was a model 99-45460 from Lafayette Radio Electronics (read about it here), many of the mics owned by my garage bandmates were from Radio Shack, usually the Realistic Highball-2. Some of you likely had at least one as well—it was a popular mic in the early 1970s that offered acceptable quality at a good price. “The Shack,” as we called it, had a number of in-house brands, including Archer (antennas and accessories), Duofone (telephones and accessories),…
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Like many professions, the pro audio business has a language all its own, with numerous unique words and phrases to describe job titles, equipment, and some of the things we use and do. Here are some examples of this distinctive lingo: Battens: Long horizontal pipes found in theatres that are used for hanging curtains and scenery. They always seem to be in an optimized lowered position so we can hit our heads of them during load-in and load-out. Biscuit: A…
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Microphones as we know them date back to about the mid-1800s, when many different inventors were trying to electronically transmit sounds from one place to another. Before then, the term microphone was used to describe an acoustical device (like an ear trumpet or stethoscope) that helped amplify sounds. One of those inventors was German physicist Johann Philipp Reis (1834-1874), who designed a sound transmitter consisting of a metallic strip resting on a membrane with a metal point contact that would…
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While we tend to think of extended bass as a modern invention, audio folks have been expanding frequency response for decades. Way back in 1932, A.C. Thuras received a patent for a bass reflex ported design, and in 1934, Andre D’Alton was granted a patent for a bandpass design. However, true separate subwoofers (dedicated band-limited enclosures with cone loudspeakers for frequencies generally below 100 Hz) did not become commonplace until the 1960s, and even then were mainly used in limited…
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